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Richard Branson recently made a bold prediction about telecommuting. "One day, offices will be a thing of the past," he wrote in a blog posting. "In 30 years time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed."

I certainly don't wonder why offices exist, and I doubt the people of 2043 will either. The trends suggest Branson is wrong. The number of people working from home will likely increase by the middle of the century, but the growth will not be exponential.

Branson, of course, was responding to the fierce debate touched off by Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer, who is requiring all employees report to the office starting in June. But he offered no evidence to support his claim, just a general defence of employees who work from home as diligent and a broad argument that forcing everyone to work in an office is old-school thinking.

"The key for me is that in today's world, I do not think it is effective or productive to force your employees one way or another," Branson wrote. "Choice empowers people and makes for a more content workforce."

That's an interesting notion. But if choice empowers people, what happens when there are no more offices in 30 years? Everyone will be forced to work from home.

Fortunately, such a major change is not about to happen. According to U.S. census data, about seven per cent of employees worked at least one day a week at home in 1997. By 2010, that had increased to just over nine per cent.

That 13-year period saw the most astonishing progress in information technology in human history (including the whole Internet thing). And yet the result was that the number of people who work even just one day a week from home increased to about one in 11 from one in 14.

Even if that growth rate continues, fewer than 20 per cent of workers will be off-site in 30 years. No need to cancel any commercial construction development or commuter transit projects, then.

Telecommuting is not for every company, nor every employee. I work from home often, but I know some people who need interaction with other employees in order to work effectively, whether that's because of their personalities or their roles.

As Yahoo pointed out in its internal memo, collaboration and inter-action are a key part of creativity and innovation. And while you save commuting time working from home, not everybody is good at investing those savings productively. While some are more effective without the diversions of the workplace, others find there are too many distractions at home for them to be as productive as they would be at the office.

Most work isn't best done in isolation. And some companies worry, naturally, about the productivity of people working from home.

"Mayer has taken a giant leap backward," Jody Thompson, a workforce consultant, told Bloomberg News. "Instead of keeping great talent, she is going to find herself with a workplace full of people who are good at showing up and putting in time."

Take that, you 90-per-centers who work in offices: Your main skill is showing up. If you had any talent, you'd be working from home.

Everyone seems to forget Yahoo is well within its rights to ask employees to report to the office to work. And since, according to reports, the move affects only hundreds of the company's more than 14,000 employees, it's hardly a revolutionary shift.

If telecommuting were so inevitable, or enhanced productivity so dramatically, it would be impossible for Yahoo or any other company to avoid.

There aren't many major companies who are insisting their employees work without phones or computers, because technology makes people more productive. If working from home had the same impact, how could any company remain competitive without insisting that more employees do it?

Despite the predictions and the extraordinary advances in technology, telecommuting has not become the norm, nor is it about to. Thirty years from now, it will almost certainly be what it is today: something that some employees do and others don't.

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